A Place to Remember You By
Open AccessA Place to Remember You By (2021) presents loss as an active site of possibility, exhibiting my actions to remap the past and rebuild a sense of home after displacement. I explore the entanglement of grief with place by recreating elements of natural and built environments where I grew up in South Florida and Long Island. After the loss of my grandparents and childhood homes, I was left to question what is essential to feeling at home and what it means to belong. I reconcile the alienation I experienced from displacement by re-imagining places of intergenerational importance and collecting material traces of my present surroundings. Inspired by my grandfather’s efforts to lay the foundation for years of social gatherings, I built new iterations of the docks he constructed in the 1980s. In place of expansive bodies of water emblematic of my home in Florida, I substituted cellophane to simulate the effects of water. Following my grandfather’s instructions for transplanting grasses, I examine the liminal space between being uprooted and replanted by partially submerging ornamental grasses in resin. Using pigments I foraged from the Potomac River, I charted the incoming tide of a local creek. Traces of my gestures and the topography of the land were embedded upon the paper’s surface, a record of my efforts to become attuned to my present surroundings. In A Place to Remember You By I challenge the sense of finality associated with loss through the construction of a place to form a sense of community. I enact the labor of care necessary to establish a sense of home by demonstrating how to make, rather than find, a place to belong. A Place to Remember You By is a contemplation in the ways we form bonds with the sites around us and how we can transform these sites into place through building connections with one another.
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Zaragoza_gwu_0075M_15819.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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